THE NOVEL angel island

Three of theother four men - Honey Smith, Frank Merrill, Pete Murphy - actually... It came after an instant, although Frank Merrill palpably pulled himselftogether to attack the problem.

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

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Title: Angel Island

Author: Inez Haynes Gillmore

Release Date: November, 2003 [Etext #4637]

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[This file was first posted on February 20, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

The Project Gutenberg Etext of Angel Island

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

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M W P

Angel Island

It was the morning after the shipwreck The five men still lay where

they had slept A long time had passed since anybody had spoken A longtime had passed since anybody had moved Indeed, it, looked almost as ifthey would never speak or move again So bruised and bloodless of skinwere they, so bleak and sharp of feature, so stark and hollow of eye, sorigid and moveless of limb that they might have been corpses Mentally,too, they were almost moribund They stared vacantly, straight out tosea They stared with the unwinking fixedness of those whose gaze iscaught in hypnotic trance

It was Frank Merrill who broke the silence finally Merrill still lookedlike a man of marble and his voice still kept its unnatural tone, level,monotonous, metallic “If I could only forget the scream that Norton kidgave when he saw the big wave coming It rings in my head And the wayhis mother pressed his head down on her breast - oh, my God!”

His listeners knew that he was going to say this They knew the verywords in which he would put it All through the night-watches he hadsaid the same thing at intervals The effect always was of a red-hot

wire drawn down the frayed ends of their nerves But again one by onethey themselves fell into line.

mild tones and to see that look of terror frozen on his mild face “I

had the same feeling that I’ve had in nightmares lots of times - that itwas horrible - and - I didn’t think I could stand it another moment -

but - of course it would soon end - like all nightmares and I’d wake

up.”

Without reason, they fell again into silence

They had passed through two distinct psychological changes since the seaspewed them up When consciousness returned, they gathered into a littleterror-stricken, gibbering group At first they babbled At first

inarticulate, confused, they dripped strings of mere words; expletives,exclamations, detached phrases, broken clauses, sentences that startedwith subjects and trailed, unpredicated, to stupid silence; sentences

beginning subjectless and hobbling to futile conclusion It was as

though mentally they slavered But every phrase, however confused andinept, voiced their panic, voiced the long strain of their fearful

buffeting and their terrific final struggle And every clause, whether

sentimental, sacrilegious, or profane, breathed their wonder, their

pathetic, poignant, horrified wonder, that such things could be All

incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to sweep fromend to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened tobeat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that

lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous,

semi-tropical coast

Then came the long, log-like stupor of their exhaustion

With the day, vocabulary, grammar, logic returned They still iterated

and reiterated their experiences, but with a coherence which graduallygrew to consistence In between, however, came sudden, sinister attacks

And a dozen times, it had elicited from the others a clamor of similar

chatter, of insignificant haphazard detail which began anywhere and

But this time it brought no comment Perhaps it served to stir faintly

an atrophied analytic sense No one of them had yet lost the shudder andthe thrill which lay in his own narrative But the experiences of the

others had begun to bore and irritate

There came after this one remark another half-hour of stupid and

readjusting silence

The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip, haddied finally but it had died hard On a quieted earth, the sea alone

showed signs of revolution The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen,were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity thatwas swift and ponderous at the same time One on one, another on

another, they came, not an instant between When they crested,

involuntarily the five men braced themselves as for a shock When theycrashed, involuntarily the five men started as if a bomb had struck

Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feeblypalpitant like an old man asleep Not far off, sucked close to a raggedreef, stretched the black bulk that had once been the Brian Boru

group Her blonde hair had already dried; it hung in stiff, salt-cloggedmasses that beat wildly about her face Beyond something rocking betweentwo wedged sea-chests, but concealed by them, constantly kicked a soddenfoot into the air Straight ahead, the naked body of a child flashed to

the crest of each wave

All this destruction ran from north to south between two reefs of blackrock It edged a broad bow-shaped expanse of sand, snowy, powdery,

rattling stiffness To the east, this silvery crescent merged finally

with a furry band of vegetation which screened the whole foreground ofthe island

The day was perfect and the scene beautiful They had watched the suncome up over the trees at their back And it was as if they had seen asunrise for the first time in their life To them, it was neither

beautiful nor familiar; it was sinister and strange A chill, that was

not of the dawn but of death itself, lay over everything The morningwind was the breath of the tomb, the smells that came to them from theisland bore the taint of mortality, the very sunshine seemed icy Theysuffered - the five survivors of the night’s tragedy - with a scarifyingsense of disillusion with Nature It was as though a beautiful, tender,and fondly loved mother had turned murderously on her children, hadwounded them nearly to death, had then tried to woo them to her breastagain The loveliness of her, the mindless, heartless, soulless

loveliness, as of a maniac tamed, mocked at their agonies, mocked withher gentle indifference, mocked with her self-satisfied placidity,

mocked with her serenity and her peace For them she was dead - deadlike those whom we no longer trust

on the torn green sea a shimmer that was almost dazzling; but ere wassomething incongruous about that - as though Nature had covered hervictim with a spangled scarf It brought out millions of sparkles in thewhite sand; and there seemed something calculating about that - asthough she were bribing them with jewels to forget

“Say, let’s cut out this business of going, over and over it,” said

Ralph Addington with a sudden burst of irritability “I guess I couldgive up the ship’s cat in exchange for a girl or two.” Addington’s facewas livid; a muscular contraction kept pulling his lips away from hiswhite teeth; he had the look of a man who grins satanically at regularintervals

By a titanic mental effort, the others connected this explosion withBilly Fairfax’s last remark It was the first expression of an emotion

so small as ill-humor It was, moreover, the first excursion out of thebeaten path of their egotisms It cleared the atmosphere a little of

that murky cloud of horror which blurred the sunlight Three of theother four men - Honey Smith, Frank Merrill, Pete Murphy - actually

“Right-o!” Honey Smith agreed weakly It was audible in his voice, theeffort to talk sanely of sane things, and in the slang of every day

“Addington’s on Let’s can it! Here we are and here we’re likely to stayfor a few days In the meantime we’ve got to live How are we going topull it off?”

Everybody considered his brief harangue; for an instant, it looked asthough this consideration was taking them all back into aimless

meditation Then, “That’s right,” Billy Fairfax took it up heroically

“Say, Merrill,” he added in almost a conversational tone, “what are ourchances? I mean how soon do we get off?”

This was the first question anybody had asked It added its

infinitesimal weight to the wave of normality which was settling overthem all Everybody visibly concentrated, listening for the answer

It came after an instant, although Frank Merrill palpably pulled himselftogether to attack the problem “I was talking that matter over with

“Cut that out,” Honey Smith ordered crisply

“We - we - were trying to figure our chances in case of a wreck,” FrankMerrill continued slowly “You see, we’re out of the beaten path - wayout Those days of drifting cooked our goose You can never tell, ofcourse, what will happen in the Pacific where there are so many trampcraft On the other hand - ” he paused and hesitated It was evident,now that he had something to expound, that Merrill had himself almostunder command, that his hesitation arose from another cause “Well,we’re all men I guess it’s up to me to tell you the truth The sooneryou all know the worst, the sooner you’ll pull yourselves together Ishouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t see a ship for several weeks -

perhaps months.”

Another of their mute intervals fell upon them Dozens of waves flashedand crashed their way up the beach; but now they trailed an iridescentnetwork of foam over the lilac-gray sand The sun raced high; but now itpoured a flood of light on the green-gray water The air grew bright and

deepened - and the sea reflected it, Suddenly the world was one huge

glittering bubble, half of which was the brilliant azure sky and half

the burnished azure sea None of the five men looked at the sea and skynow The other four were considering Frank Merrill’s words and he wasconsidering the other four

“Lord, God!” Ralph Addington exclaimed suddenly “Think of being in aplace like this six months or a year without a woman round! Why, we’ll

horror and shame that I feel to have survived when every woman drowned,

I confess to that feeling too Women keep up the standards of life It

would have made a great difference with us if there were only one or twowomen here.”

“If there’d been five, you mean,” Ralph Addington amended A feeble,

Nobody added anything to this But now the other three considered RalphAddington’s words with the same effort towards concentration that theyhad brought to Frank Merrill’s Somehow his smile - that flashing smilewhich showed so many teeth against a background of dark beard - pointedhis words uncomfortably

Of them all, Ralph Addington was perhaps, the least popular This wasstrange; for he was a thorough sport, a man of a wide experience He wassalesman for a business concern that manufactured a white shoe-polish,and he made the rounds of the Oriental countries every year He was acareful and intelligent observer both of men and things He was widely

if not deeply read He was an interesting talker He could, for or

instance, meet each of the other four on some point of mental contact Asuperficial knowledge of sociology and a practical experience with manyraces brought him and Frank Merrill into frequent discussion His

interest in all athletic sports and his firsthand information in regard

to them made common ground between him and Billy Fairfax With Honey

German opera, French literature, American muckraking, and Japanese art.The flaw which made him alien was not of personality but of character

mysterious flexible, half-developed code which governs their relations

with women But no law of that code compelled them to punish him forungenerous treatment of somebody’s else wife or sister Had he been

dishonorable with them, had he once borrowed without paying, had he oncecheated at cards, they would have ostracized him forever He had done

none of these things, of course

“By jiminy!” exclaimed Honey Smith, “how I hate the unfamiliar air ofeverything I’d like to put my lamps on something I know A ranch and around-up would look pretty good to me at this moment Or a New Englandfarmhouse with the cows coming home That would set me up quicker than ahighball.”

“The University campus would seem like heaven to me,” Frank Merrillconfessed drearily, “and I’d got so the very sight of it nearly drove me

insane.”

“The Great White Way for mine,” said Pete Murphy, “at night - all the

corset and whisky signs flashing, the streets jammed with

“Say,” Billy Fairfax burst out suddenly; and for the first time since

the shipwreck a voice among them carried a clear business-like note ofcuriosity “You fellows troubled with your eyes? As sure as shooting,I’m seeing things Out in the west there - black spots - any of the rest

of you get them?”

One or two of the group glanced cursorily backwards A pair of

perfunctory “Noes!” greeted Billy’s inquiry

“Well, I’m daffy then,” Billy decided He went on with a sudden abnormalvolubility “Queer thing about it is I’ve been seeing them the whole

morning I’ve just got back to that Point where I realized there was

something wrong I’ve always had a remarkably far sight.” He rushed on

at the same speed; but now he had the air of one who is trying to

but there are no birds large enough - wish it would stop, though

reconcile puzzling phenomena with natural laws “And it seems as if -Perhaps you get a different angle of vision down in these parts Did any

of you ever hear of that Russian peasant who could see the four moons of

Nobody answered his question But it seemed suddenly to bring them back

to the normal

“See here, boys,” Frank Merrill said, an unexpected note of authority inhis voice, “we can’t sit here all the morning like this We ought to rig

up a signal, in case any ship - Moreover, we’ve got to get together andsave as much as we can We’ll be hungry in a little while We can’t liedown on that job too long.”

Honey Smith jumped to his feet “Well, Lord knows, I want to get busy Idon’t want to do any more thinking, thank you How I ache! Every muscle

in my body is raising particular Hades at this moment.”

The others pulled themselves up, groaned, stretched, eased protestingmuscles Suddenly Honey Smith pounded Billy Fairfax on the shoulder,

“You’re it, Billy,” he said and ran down the beach In another instant

they were all playing tag This changed after five minutes to baseballwith a lemon for a ball and a chair-leg for a bat A mood of wild

exhilaration caught them The inevitable psychological reaction had set

a cobweb in a flame Never had sea or sky or earth seemed more lovely,more lusciously, voluptuously lovely The sparkle of the salt wind

tingled through their bodies like an electric current The warmth in theair lapped them like a hot bath Joy-in-life flared up in them to such aheight that it kept them running and leaping meaninglessly They shoutedwild phrases to each other They burst into song At times they yelledscraps of verse

“We’ll come across something to eat soon,” said Frank Merrill, breathinghard “Then we’ll be all right.”

“I feel - better - for that run - already,” panted Billy Fairfax

“Haven’t seen a black spot for five minutes.”

Nobody paid any attention to him, and in a few minutes he was paying noattention to himself Their expedition was offering too many shocks ofhorror and pathos Fortunately the change in their mood held It was,indeed, as unnatural as their torpor, and must inevitably bring its ownreaction But after each of these tragic encounters, they recovered

buoyancy, recovered it with a resiliency that had something almost

Helter-skelter, hit-or-miss, in a blind orgy of rescue, at first they

pulled out everything they could reach Repeatedly, Frank Merrill

stopped to lecture them on the foolish risks they were taking, on thestupidity of such a waste of energy “Save what we need!’ he iteratedand reiterated, bellowing to make himself heard “What we can use now -canned stuff, tools, clothes! This lumber’ll come back on the next

tide.”

He seemed to keep a supervising eye on all of them; for his voice,

waves Realizing finally that he was the man of the hour, the others

ended by following his instructions blindly

Merrill, himself, was no shirk His strength seemed prodigious When any

of the others attempted to land something too big to handle alone, he

was always near to help; and yet, unaided, he accomplished twice as much

as the busiest

Frank Merrill, professor of a small university in the Middle West, wasthe scholar of the group, a sociologist traveling in the Orient to studyconditions He was not especially popular with his companions, althoughthey admired him and deferred to him On the other hand, he was notunpopular; it was more that they stood a little in awe of him

On his mental side, he was a typical academic product Normally his

conversation, both in subject-matter and in verbal form, bore towardspedantry It was one curious effect of this crisis that he had reverted

to the crisp Anglo-Saxon of his farm-nurtured youth

On his moral side, he was a typical reformer, a man of impeccable

had never sought the company of women, and in fact he knew nothing aboutthem Women had had no more bearing on his life than the fourth

dimension

On his physical side he was a wonder

Six feet four in height, two hundred and fifty pounds in weight, he

looked the viking He had carried to the verge of middle age the habits

of an athletic youth It was said that half his popularity in his

university world was due to the respect he commanded from the studentsbecause of his extraordinary feats in walking and lifting He was

impressive, almost handsome For what of his face his ragged, rusty

beard left uncovered was regularly if coldly featured He was ascetic intype Moreover, the look of the born disciplinarian lay on him His blueeyes carried a glacial gleam Even through his thick mustache, the lines

of his mouth showed iron

After a while, Honey Smith came across a water-tight tin of matches

“Great Scott, fellows!” he exclaimed “I’m hungry enough to drop Let’sknock off for a while and feed our faces How about mock turtle, chicken

They built a fire, opened cans of soup and vegetables

“The Waldorf has nothing on that,” Pete Murphy said when they stopped,gorged

the immaculate little lads? I can’t think of a single bad habit we can

acquire in this place No smokes, no drinks, few if any eats - and not achorister in sight Let’s organize the Robinson Crusoe Purity League,Parlor Number One.”

“Oh, gee!” Pete Murphy burst out “It’s just struck me The Wilmington

‘Blue,’ is lost forever - it must have gone down with everything else.”

of ice - take it from muh! Hope the mermaids fight shy of it.”

“The Wilmington ‘Blue’ isn’t alone in that,” Ralph Addington said “Allbig diamonds have raised hell You ought to hear some of the stories

they tell in India about the rajahs’ treasures Some of those briolettes

- you listen long enough and you come to the conclusion that the soonerall the big stones are cut up, the better.”

work only at high water Between times, we can explore the island - ” Hespoke as if he were wheedling a group of boys with the promise of play

Under his direction, they nailed a pair of sheets, one at the southern,the other at the northern reef, to saplings which they stripped of

branches Then they went back to the struggle for salvage

The fascination of work - and of such novel work - still held them Theylabored the rest of the morning, lay off for a brief lunch, went at it

again in the afternoon, paused for dinner, and worked far into the

evening Once they stopped long enough to build a huge signal fire onthe each When they turned in, not one of them but nursed torn and

down

They slept until long after sunrise

It was Pete Murphy who waked them “Say, who was it, yesterday, talkedabout seeing black spots? I’m hanged if I’m not hipped, too When I wokejust before sunrise, there were black things off there in the west Of

perfect case I’ve ever seen of the survival of the fittest.”

And in fact, they were all, except for Pete Murphy, big men, and all,

even he, active, strong-muscled, and in the pink of condition

The huge tide had not entirely subsided, but there was a perceptible

diminution in the height of the waves Up beyond the water-line lay afresh installment of jetsam But, as before, they labored only to save

the flotsam They worked all the morning

In the afternoon, they dug a huge trench Frank Merrill presiding, theyburied the dead with appropriate ceremony

“Thank God, that’s done,” Ralph Addington said with a shudder “I hatedeath and everything to do with it.”

Nothing could better have indicated Honey’s mental turmoil than the factthat he talked in broken phrases rather than in his usual clear,

swift-footed curt sentences

Nobody noticed this Nobody offered comment Nobody seemed surprised Infact, all the psychological areas which explode in surprise and wonder

woman’s laugh Any of you others get it?”

The sense of humor, it seemed, was not extinct Honey’s companions burstinto roars of laughter For the rest of the morning, they joked Honey

about his hallucination And Honey, who always responded in kind to anybadinage, received this in silence In fact, wherever he could, a little

pointedly, he changed the subject

Honey Smith was the type of man whom everybody jokes, partly because hereceived it with such good humor, partly because he turned it back with

so ready and so charming a wit Also it gave his fellow creatures a

gratifying sense of equality to pick humorous flaws in one so manifestly

a darling of the gods

Honey Smith possessed not a trace of genius, not a suggestion of what ispopularly termed “temperament.” He had no mind to speak of, and not morethan the usual amount of character In fact, but for one thing, he was

an average person That one thing was personality - and personality he

possessed to an extraordinary degree Indeed, there seemed to be

something mysteriously compelling about this personality of Honey’s The

temporarily, they too bloomed with personality As for women - His

appearance among them was the signal for a noiseless social cataclysm.They slipped and slid in his direction as helplessly as if an inclined

plane had opened under their feet They fluttered in circles about himlike birds around a light If he had been allowed to follow the pull of

his inclination, they would have held a subsidiary place in his

existence For he was practical, balanced, sane He had, moreover, thetendency towards temperance of the born athlete Besides all this, hismain interests were man-interests But women would not let him alone Hehad but to look and the thing was done Wreaths hung on every balconyfor Honey Smith and, always at his approach, the door of the harem swungwide He was a little lazy, almost discourteously uninterested in his

really tall, although his broad shoulders seemed to reduce him to mediumheight Brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired, his skin was as smooth

moving-picture company Socially they made an excellent team For Billycontributed money, birth, breeding, and position to augment Honey’s

contrasts quite as striking On his physical side, he was shapelessly

strong and hopelessly ugly, a big, shock-headed blond On his personalside “mere mutt-man” was the way one girl put it, “too much of a damnedgentleman” Honey Smith said to him regularly

Billy Fairfax was not, however, without charm of a certain shy, evasive,slow-going kind; and he was not without his own distinction His hugefortune had permitted him to cultivate many expensive sports and

sporting tastes His studs and kennels and strings of polo ponies were

famous He was a polo-player well above the average and an aviator notfar below it

Pete Murphy, the fifth of the group, was the delight of them all The

carriage of a bantam rooster, the courage of a lion, more brain than hecould stagger under; a disposition fiery, mercurial, sanguine, witty; hewas made, according to Billy Fairfax’s dictum, of “wire and brass

tacks,” and he possessed what Honey Smith (who himself had no mean gift

in that direction) called “the gift of gab.” He lived by writing

magazine articles Also he wrote fiction, verse, and drama Also he was

a painter Also he was a musician In short, he was an Irishman

sapience of the painter’s training If he could have existed in a

universe which consisted entirely of sound and color, a universe

inhabited only by disembodied spirits, he would have been its ablestcitizen; but he was utterly disqualified to live in a human world He

was absolutely incapable of judging people His tendency was to

underestimate men and to overestimate women His life bore all the scarsinevitable to such an instinct Women, in particular, had played ducksand drakes with his career Weakly chivalrous, mindlessly gallant, helacked the faculty of learning by experience - especially where the

other sex were concerned “Predestined to be stung!” was, his first

wife’s laconic comment on her ex-husband She, for instance, was

undoubtedly the blameworthy one in their marital failure, but she hadmanaged to extract a ruinous alimony from him Twice married and twicedivorced, he was traveled through the Orient to write a series of muckraking articles and, incidentally if possible, to forget his last

unhappy matrimonial venture

Physically, Pete was the black type of Celt The wild thatch of his

scrubbing-brush hair shone purple in the light Scrape his face as he

blue-gray-green eyes of the colleen There was a curious untamable

quality in his look that was the mixture of two mad strains, the

aloofness of the Celt and the aloofness of the genius

Three weeks passed The clear, warm-cool, lucid, sunny weather kept up.The ocean flattened, gradually Twice every twenty-four hours the tidebrought treasure; but it brought less and less every day Occasionallycame a stiffened human reminder of their great disaster But calloused

as they were now to these experiences, the men buried it with hasty

ceremony and forgot

By this time an incongruous collection stretched in parallel lines abovethe high-water mark “Something, anything, everything - and then some,”remarked Honey Smith Wood wreckage of all descriptions, acres offurniture, broken, split, blistered, discolored, swollen; piles of

carpets, rugs, towels, bed-linen, stained, faded, shrunken, torn; files

of swollen mattresses, pillows, cushions, life-preservers; heaps of

table-silver and kitchen-ware tarnished and rusty; mounds of china andglass; mountains of tinned goods, barrels boxes, books, suit-cases,

Part of the time, in between tides, they tried to separate the grain ofthis huge collection of lumber from the chaff; part of the time they

made exploring trips into the interior At night they sat about their

huge fire and talked

The island proved to be about twenty miles in length by seven in width

It was uninhabited and there were no large animals on it It was FrankMerrill’s theory that it was the exposed peak of a huge extinct volcano

In the center, filling the crater, was a little fresh-water lake The

island was heavily wooded; but in contour it presented only diminutivecontrasts of hill and valley And except as the semi-tropical foliageoffered novelties of leaf and flower, the beauties of unfamiliar shapesand colors, it did not seem particularly interesting Ralph Addingtonwas the guide of these expeditions From this tree, he pointed out, theSouth Sea Islander manufactured the tappa cloth, from that the

poeepooee, from yonder the arva Honey Smith used to say that the onlydepressing thing about these trips was the utter silence of the gorgeousbirds which they saw on every side On the other hand, they extracted

Sorting what Honey Smith called the “ship-duffle” was one prolongedadventure At first they made little progress; for all five of them

gathered over each important find, chattering like girls Each man

followed the bent of his individual instinct for acquisitiveness FrankMerrill picked out books, paper, writing materials of every sort RalphAddington ran to clothes The habit of the man with whom it is a

business policy to appear well-dressed maintained itself; even in theirEveless Eden, he presented a certain tailored smartness Billy Fairfaxselected kitchen utensils and tools Later, he came across a box filledwith tennis rackets, nets, and balls The rackets’ strings had snappedand the balls were dead He began immediately to restring the rackets,

to make new balls from twine, to lay out a court Like true soldiers offortune, Honey Smith and Pete Murphy made no special collection; theylooted for mere loot’s sake

One day, in the midst of one of their raids, Honey Smith yelled a

surprised and triumphant, “By jiminy!” The others showed no signs, of

to be a Japanese print or a corkscrew But as nobody stirred or spoke,

he called, “The Wilmington ‘Blue’!”

These words carried their inevitable magic His companions droppedeverything; they swarmed about him

Honey held on his palm what, in the brilliant sunlight looked like aglobe of blue fire, a fire that emitted rainbows instead of sparks

He passed it from hand to hand It seemed a miracle that the fingerswhich touched it did not burst into flame For a moment the five menmight have been five children